A chip manufacturing facility is composed of a broad spectrum of technologies. Cassettes containing semiconductor substrates (e.g., wafers) are routed to various stations in a facility where they are either processed or inspected. Semiconductor processing generally involves the deposition of material onto and removal (“etching” and/or “planarizing”) of material from substrates. Typical processes include chemical vapor deposition (CVD), plasma enhanced CVD (PECVD), physical vapor deposition (PVD), electroplating, chemical mechanical planarization (CMP), and etching, among others.
One concern in semiconductor processing is substrate throughput. Generally, the greater the substrate throughput, the lower the manufacturing cost and therefore the lower the cost of the processed substrates. In order to increase substrate processing throughput, batch processing chambers have been developed as have been systems that employ more than one end effector on a robot arm within a multi-chamber processing system.
In semiconductor processing and other electronics processing, platforms employ the use of robot arms to transport objects such as the wafers between process chambers, from storage areas to process chambers, from process chambers to storage areas, and so on. Customers using these platforms seek capability to have a greater number of process steps, and thus higher throughput of processed substrates, without damaging the vacuum robot, which employs a robotic arm, from over use.